Revenge of the Goldfish © 1981 Sandy Skoglund

Sandy Skoglund was born in Quincy, Massachusetts in 1946. Skoglund studied studio art and art history at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts from 1964-68. She went on to graduate school at the University of Iowa in 1969 where she studied filmmaking, intaglio printmaking, and multimedia art, receiving her M.A. in 1971 and her M.F.A. in painting in 1972.

Skoglund moved to New York City in 1972, where she started working as a conceptual artist, dealing with repetitive, process-oriented art production through the techniques of mark-making and photocopying. In the late seventies Skoglund’s desire to document conceptual ideas led her to teach herself photography. This developing interest in photographic technique became fused with her interest in popular culture and commercial picture making strategies, resulting in the directorial tableau work she is known for today. Skoglund currently lives in Jersey City, New Jersey.

http://www.sandyskoglund.com

Image Credit: © Kurt Schwitters, Merzbau, 1924-37

Schwitters is very well known for his monumental Merzbau, a structure which was his own house. And so Kurt Schwitters picked refuse up off the ground and attempted to build a place in which he could live. Is this not the very task that faces modern society the vitality of which depends upon urban infrastructure and city planning?

“[E]verything had broken down in any case and new things had to be made out of the fragments: and this is Merz. It was like an image of the revolution within me, not as it was, but as it should have been.”
–Kurt Schwitters

The Suburban Atlanta series was published in A New Life: Stories and Photographs from the Suburban South, edited by Alex Harris with Alice Rose George. The images, texts, and excerpts from interviews, portray Atlanta as it was lived by people that Sligh met in 1996. In this series, the artist investigates the tensions between the fantasy and the reality of the Southern experience as experienced by people of color. She also explores the differences between individual freedom and social convention. A New Life is a book published by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in association with W.W. Norton & Company.

http://clarissasligh.com

Image Credit: © Marcel Duchamp, Mile of String, 1942, New York

In 1942, Andre Breton organised a retrospective exhibition of Surrealist art in New York: First Papers of Surrealism. For the vernissage Marcel Duchamp created this installation – a gigantic web – called the Mile of String. He and Breton furthermore arranged for a number of children to ball in the room thereby making it very difficult for the guests to see the paintings.

con’t

Installation view – Playing the Building, Battery Maritime Building, New York, NY, 2008

Creative Time presents Playing the building, a sound installation in which the infrastructure, the physical plant of the building, is converted into a giant musical instrument. Devices are attached to the building structure — to the metal beams and pillars, the heating pipes, the water pipes — and are used to make these things produce sound. The activations are of three types: wind, vibration, striking. The devices do not produce sound themselves, but they cause the building elements to vibrate, resonate and oscillate so that the building itself becomes a very large musical instrument.

more info here

Image Credit: Jonathan Gitelson, The Green Dolphin Street
Jonathon Gitelson, Chicago, IL

The Car ProjectDuring the summer of 2004, I moved across the street from the Funky Buddha Lounge, a popular nightclub in Chicago’s West Loop Neighborhood. Each night I would park my car on the street and each morning I would find that numerous club fliers had been shoved beneath my windshield wipers and into the cracks of my windows. By the time I got to my car each morning, many of the other car owners had already left for the day, discarding their fliers on the ground. This form of advertising intrigued me – an attempt at communication with consumers that was clearly failing, creating huge volumes of what was essentially expensively printed instant garbage.Shortly after I moved in, I began collecting the fliers from my car and from the sidewalk around my home. By the winter of 2004/2005, I had collected over 1000 fliers, enough to cover my entire car. I spent three months hand-sewing the fliers together to create a car cover and have photographed the car, with car cover, parked in front of the clubs from whom I had received fliers.“The Car Project” was completed in December of 2005 and consists of eight large-scale photographs. Each exhibition print is digitally printed at 40” X 50” which allows the viewer to read the individual fliers within each photograph.

more photographs

Copyright practices have become a front-burner issue as more creative works are posted on the Web. While the online environment provides an efficient and expedient way to market all kinds of work, once it is posted there is little protection against intellectual property theft. The following begins a series of articles describing some movements aimed at finding solutions to current copyright practices that can no longer effectively meet the needs of the accelerated evolution of the contents on the world wide web.

continue reading at artdogspot.com

leoburnett.ca

My photographic work uses visual and textual narrative to explore the way that we construct meaning in contemporary culture through the lenses of religion, consumer behavior, and secular mythologies. My stories weave tales of ordinary days gone peculiar, obsessive methods of analysis and insignificant objects that suddenly take on extraordinary significance. Miraculous pennies arrive in the mail, healing spells transfer through television programming and fortune cookie numbers win the lotto. Through this darkly humorous storytelling I dissect the line between belief and skepticism, while examining ideas of personal truth and common misperceptions surrounding photographic documents.

more images at www.natelarson.com

Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography
401 Richmond St West Suite 120 Toronto Ontario M5V 3A8
www.gallery44.org

GOOGLE EARTH
Eryn Foster and John van der Woude

October 23 – November 28, 2009

CHANGING THE WAY WE VIEW THE EARTH – TWO ARTISTS CONSIDER THE IMPLICATIONS OF GOOGLE EARTH

From the first aerial photograph made by Nadar in 1858 to the first fully illuminated view of planet Earth taken by the crew of Apollo 17 in 1972 to the release of Google Earth 3.0 in 2005, our access to views of the Earth has increased exponentially. In their exhibition at Gallery 44, Eryn Foster and John van der Woude demonstrate what can be done with the visual information made publicly available today by Google Earth.

In Eryn Foster’s animation, Flight Simulation, aerial perspectives of the landscape coalesce into the abstract renderings and discontinuous movements of computer-generated images. Flight Simulation thus brings to our attention the sociological distance we have traversed from being airplanes passengers to being “virtual navigators”—as Foster refers to the users of Google Earth—and how this “developed” perspective affects our relationship to the Earth.

John van der Woude’s series of photographs, Airports—composites of satellite images downloaded from Google Earth—show us in astonishing detail the nine busiest airports in the world. Van der Woude refers to the airport as “a metaphor for the ultimate strength and weakness of contemporary life”. Beyond their formal beauty, his images immediately bring to mind issues of accessibility in an age when populous locations are prime terrorist targets.

Eryn Foster is an interdisciplinary artist who currently lives and works in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia University and a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Guelph. She has participated in residencies at the Banff Art Centre, the MacDowell Art Colony in New Hampshire and the Vermont Studio Centre. From 2005 to 2009 she was the director of the artist-run Eyelevel Gallery in Halifax and has also worked as an instructor in the Foundation Studies program at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University.

John van der Woude is a photography and new media artist, based in Montreal, who initially studied art and design at Camosun College in Victoria, British Columbia and later received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 2007, focusing on photography and graphic design. He has won multiple awards, including the Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward 2008 award and the BMO Financial Group’s 1st Art! Competition. His work has been shown in galleries across Canada and has been featured on many media outlets, including CTV and CBC, both locally and nationally.

A catalog essay by Marco Avolio accompanying the exhibition is available at www.gallery44.org

A PARTICIPATORY ART PROJECT THAT LINKS THE TWENTY PLACES IN THE UNITED STATES CALLED ‘JERUSALEM’ WITH THE ORIGINAL JERUSALEM IN ISRAEL FOR WHICH THEY ARE NAMED. THERE ARE JERUSALEMS IN ALABAMA, ARKANSAS, GEORGIA, MARYLAND, MICHIGAN, NEW YORK, NORTH CAROLINA, OHIO, RHODE ISLAND, TENNESSEE, UTAH, AND VERMONT. RESIDENTS AND VISITORS TO THE AMERICAN JERUSALEMS ARE INVITED TO PARTICIPATE BY SENDING PHOTOGRAPHS OF EVERYDAY LIFE TO BE MATCHED BY PHOTOGRAPHS FROM JERUSALEM, ISRAEL.

JerUSAlem
INVITATION TO PARTICIPATE
JerUSAlem-USA is a participatory art project that links the twenty Jerusalems in the United States with the original Jerusalem in Israel. There are Jerusalems in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Maryland, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Utah, and Vermont.

You are invited to visit and join with residents of the American Jerusalems in sending photographs of everyday life there (people, homes, shops, flora and fauna, community events and celebrations, signs with the name ‘Jerusalem,’ scenery, etc.). These photographs will be matched by images of everyday life in Jerusalem, Israel, and posted on the ‘JerUSAlem-USA’ blog.

http://jerusalem-usa.blogspot.com

Plot Synopsis: Max is a genius mathematician who’s built a supercomputer at home that provides something that can be understood as a key for understanding all existence. Representatives both from a Hasidic cabalistic sect and high-powered Wall Street firm hear of that secret and attempt to seduce him.

π was written and directed by Darren Aronofsky, and filmed on high-contrast black-and-white reversal film.

In 1996 Aronofsky began creating the concept for his first feature film “π”, a psychological sci-fi thriller. After the π script received great reactions from friends, he began production. The film re-teamed Aronofsky with Sean Gullette, who played the lead. During production, Aronofsky and crew realized they didn’t have enough money to complete the film. Associate Producer Scott Franklin came up with the idea to raise completion funds by asking every person they knew for $100. Later in production certain individuals put in more cash, which let Aronofsky complete the film. After π was completed (with a budget somewhere around $60,000), it premiered at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival and Aronofsky won the Directing Award. The film was picked up by distributor Artisan Entertainment and released in selected cities. The film later won an Independent Spirit Award and the Open Palm. $100 investors were said to be subsequently re-paid with $150. However, certain crew members complained that they were never paid at all. Crew members confronted Aronofsky about this, and he claimed he was suing his distributor. Use of the SnorriCam is one of Darren Aronofsky’s trademarks, as featured in π.

Chris After Hours of Spitting Food Dye Outdoors, 2004
c-print, 41 1/2 x 62 1/2 inches Framed, Edition of 5

Codex, 2007
HD & SD video/ Jitter/ mac mini

Atrium Gallery, Richmond Center
Frostic Video and Sound Art Series

more information and complete schedule: wmuvideo.wordpress.com

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